A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  He could almost hear his mother laughing under her breath. People are starving to death because of the Five-Year Plan, and here you are smoking English cigarettes. Now that’s what I call a revolutionary. Velichko loved his mother, he truly did, but she didn’t understand the work he was doing, the need to identify and exterminate enemies of the people. Cancer came in many forms: Trotskyist saboteurs, large landowners, wealthy anti-Stalinist peasants known as kulaks, comrades old and new attempting to sabotage the committee’s plans, straying from orthodoxy for their own personal gain. It was exhausting work, and sometimes Velichko had his doubts, wondering if the repression and terror ravaging the country were necessary. The purification of society was turning into something of an orgy. But there was no doubt they were changing the face of history, and generations to come would be the ones to judge them for it. After all, he was but a simple ideology instructor.

  On the sentry box at the aircraft-manufacturing complex was a large cement plaque bearing the Osoaviakhim insignia: the red star, with propeller wings and a rifle crossed over it. The place was enormous, divided into manufacturing and storage bays, and the level of activity was frenetic. He headed for the glider division and had no trouble finding the loading docks, lined up on an alley where large trucks maneuvered, unloading thick steel beams. To his right, a stairway led down to an old training school and a series of offices that had gone unused for some time. The door opened with a gentle push.

  At the end of a long corridor, disused furniture had been piled up—tables, chairs, filing cabinets—barely visible in the dim light. The windows were too high and narrow, essentially serving as skylights so that it wasn’t totally impossible to see. It smelled of old urine and excrement, and rats darted with alarming speed among the remains of rotting garbage and wooden planks strewn across the cracked tile floor. It was ridiculous, and he’d never have admitted this in public, but Velichko had been afraid of rats since the night he awoke to a sharp pain in his ear, only to find that it was literally being eaten by one of those sickening rodents.

  As if to magically ward them off, he shined a torch in that direction.

  “This way, Instructor Velichko.”

  The familiar voice of subaltern Srolov calmed him. Srolov was a good man, had been on a kolkhoz, and kept both a little book filled with pictures of saints and a well-worn portrait of Stalin tucked into its pages—which was something of a contradiction. Srolov was as loyal as a stray dog who’d been shown a bit of affection. Velichko wasn’t hard on him, didn’t insult him, and from time to time would chat with the man over a cup of coffee, sharing one of his English cigarettes. That was why the stocky old man had called him first; he realized how serious the matter at hand might be.

  “Where is he?”

  The subaltern shined the torch at a small iron storm door that led to a lower floor.

  “I thought it would be safest to hide him in the sewage tunnels.”

  Velichko nodded; it was a good idea. They climbed down a metal staircase and found themselves in a vaulted tunnel where it was impossible to stand up straight without banging your head into the network of pipes. The mildewed brick floor trembled beneath their feet; they were directly below the loading bays. Every ten yards, the tunnel bifurcated, creating a maze of narrow corridors. Without the torch, if you didn’t know your way around, it would be very easy to get lost. Clearly it had been years since anyone had been down there.

  Finally, the subaltern stopped where two paths branched, hesitated for a moment, and then turned right.

  “Where the hell are you taking me?” Velichko asked Srolov’s backside.

  “Almost there.”

  The narrow passageway led to a sort of cave that seemed only half dug. Its walls and ceiling were minimally supported with beams that looked none too stable, and the ground was like damp clay, covered in droplets of moisture. Velichko took the torch from Srolov and turned in a circle, illuminating the space around him until he came to a lump against the wall. It resembled a pile of rags so filthy that it had solidified. Were it not for the subtle rise and fall of breathing and a coughing fit, he’d never have guessed this was a human.

  “That’s him?” he asked in shock and disgust.

  Srolov nodded, and then, as though to prove it, pulled back a frayed blanket on top of him.

  A man—if this pile of skin and bones could be called such a thing—recoiled, trembling and murmuring something unintelligible.

  “What’s he saying?”

  Srolov shrugged. “I don’t know. He just babbles. Probably delirious. I searched him, but he doesn’t have any documentation on him. All I found was this. He tried to bite me when I took it off him; I had to hit him.”

  He held a small locket out to Velichko. It looked to be of poor quality, worthless. Opening it, he saw the picture of a young woman and a little girl. The woman had the aristocratic bearing of the kulaks Velichko detested. Arrogant and intractable, they were difficult to win over. Some people might consider her attractive—gray eyes, straight dark hair pulled into a high bun, unadorned ears, and a symmetrical face that was framed by a lace collar. The girl was her daughter, there was no doubt about that. A miniature of the woman, with the same steady, watchful eyes.

  “Maybe it’s his family.”

  Srolov seemed unconvinced. “He probably stole it.”

  Velichko turned the locket over. A name had been coarsely carved into the back, with a jackknife from what he could guess: Irina. Perplexed, he gazed at the man, who whimpered in the darkness and then made as if to scuttle away like a rat. An enormous gray pestilent rat. Velichko held on to the locket.

  “How did you find him?” he asked.

  Srolov glanced toward the doorway, which was completely dark. Suddenly he seemed hesitant, as though regretting having brought his superior here, or as though he hadn’t counted on being asked such an obvious question.

  “Years ago, I worked in the glider division, so I knew there were unused offices down here, a lot of wood and old furniture. Nobody wants it, so I thought I could cut up the wood, bit by bit, and take it home. Coal is so expensive now, and you have to keep the fire burning…”

  “You’ve been stealing from the State, but that’s not what concerns me at the moment. Get to the point.”

  Srolov was shaken by Velichko’s frosty tone.

  “I saw someone hide. I thought it was a dog, but I threw a rock and heard him cry out. That’s when I realized it was a person. At first I thought it must be one of those beggars that doesn’t have a passport. I tried to trap him, but he got away, and I followed him here.”

  “What makes you so sure that he’s an escaped deportee?”

  Srolov glimpsed the possibility of redemption. He bent over the man, who groaned weakly, and tore off the remains of his tattered shirt. Then he asked his superior to shine the light. On the man’s chest were two tattooed words: Óstrov Smerti.

  Velichko’s eyes widened as he studied this human waste.

  Seek and ye shall find, said the Gospels. Well, he’d found without having to seek. But far from being pleased about it, he agonized. If what he suspected was true, if this man had come from the island of Nazino, from Óstrov Smerti, and he could keep him alive long enough to talk, then Velichko’s future was about to change forever, in one way or another. Since late May of the previous year, he’d been collecting partial testimonies, baseless comments, and military gossip about what had happened deep in Western Siberia, near the confluence of the Ob and Nazina rivers. A sickening holocaust, more than four thousand dead in three months. Until now he’d had no proof, no way to corroborate his suspicions that what people were saying was true.

  “What are we going to do with him?” Srolov asked. “According to procedure, we’re supposed to hand him over to the OGPU; he’s a fugitive.”

  Velichko held up a hand, demanding time to think. He knew the protocol, dammit, he didn�
��t need to be reminded. But was he prepared to confront Genrikh Yagoda, the powerful chief of the OGPU, and Matvei Berman, head of the GULAG? They were the pair responsible for the so-called special settlements, which led to an ambitious deportation plan aimed at transferring more than two million people to uninhabited regions of Siberia and Kazakhstan. As they’d told Stalin, the idea was to make over two million acres of barren land productive in a period of no more than two years. The plan was too grandiose to be feasible using only peasant labor and enemies of the people for the work.

  First they’d emptied the prisons, but this proved insufficient as well. The Five-Year Plan was causing famines in the countryside, and peasants were immigrating en masse to large cities. To stop them, Yagoda and Berman had come up with the idea for internal passports. Anyone not registered in a city was ineligible for a passport, and without one they had no right to be there and could be detained and deported immediately. This had unleashed a veritable nightmare. Pressured by their superiors, the police conducted indiscriminate roundups, mindlessly casting their nets like fishermen who trawled for anything they could catch.

  There was talk of monumental blunders. Velichko had already managed to document a few. For instance, an old woman named Guseva, from Murom, whose husband was an old-guard Communist and had been station chief for twenty-three years, had gone to Moscow to buy some bread. The police had arrested her for not having papers on her, and she’d disappeared. Despite her husband’s demands, he had received only excuses and conflicting information from the authorities. In another case that had been brought to Velichko’s attention, a young man named Novozhilov, a stoker in a compressor factory who’d received multiple awards for his productivity and was a member of the labor committee, had been deported for no reason at all. According to what his wife told Velichko, the only thing he’d done was go outside to smoke while waiting for her to go to the movies. A couple of guards happened by, and they wouldn’t even let him go upstairs to his apartment for his papers. The list went on and on, and every one of these horrific tales ended at the same place, which the relevant authorities swore did not exist: the island of Nazino.

  Perhaps this man just barely clinging to life, this man whose flesh hung from his bones, could be of some use. Provided that he hadn’t completely lost his mind.

  “Find a safe place to hide him, and have a doctor you trust take a look at him. I don’t want anyone to know he exists for now, at least not until he’s able to speak.”

  The subaltern swung his heavy head like an ox.

  “I’m not sure that’s right. We should turn him in.”

  Velichko raised the torch and glowered. His eyes, green and flashing, left no room for doubt.

  “Do as I say or it will be you climbing aboard one of those barges headed for Siberia. Stealing from Osoaviakhim is a very grave offense.”

  Srolov grew pale, made a face, and nodded. “As you wish.”

  Velichko crouched down before the man, who recoiled from the light, curling up like a snail. He smelled like death itself, and his entire body was covered in filth and blood, both scabs and open wounds. He was emaciated and his scaly skin hung loose, looking as though it might come off in your hands if you touched him. The man covered his face with his forearms; Velichko couldn’t get a look at it.

  “Can you understand me? No one is going to hurt you. You don’t need to be afraid. We just want to help you.”

  Speaking quietly, he managed pull the man’s forearm down and had to make a concerted effort not to scream at what he saw: the right eye socket empty; cheekbones jutting out violently, pulling taut the skin around his jaws, which were missing half their teeth. The escapee had been beaten savagely, judging by the lacerations and bruises still visible, and his swollen nose had been broken, perhaps some time ago. His left eye, dark as a button, watched the instructor, frightened as a cornered animal. He was moving his cracked lips but saying nothing comprehensible, repeating some sort of litany under his breath.

  When Velichko stood back up, the man suddenly reacted. A gnarled hand shot out from the dirty rags, quickly grabbing hold of the instructor’s forearm. Velichko felt the man’s fingernails digging into his combat jacket and instinctively recoiled in horror. Srolov made as if to strike him, but Velichko stopped him. The man’s other hand emerged, palm open, as though begging. It took a few seconds for Velichko to realize what the hand and eye were asking.

  “The locket? You want me to give back your locket?” He pulled the medallion from his pocket and put it in the man’s hand. “All right, I will. On one condition. Tell me your name.”

  The man clamped his fingers shut and recoiled once more. Shrinking back in the darkness, he said: “My name is Elías Gil Villa.”

  She was alive; she had to be, he said to himself, stroking the locket’s photo. It was the only consolation he had. Anything else was too awful to contemplate. Sitting in a chair, hands on his knees, Elías gazed out the window. On the table was a bowl of broth with a few vegetables, which he hadn’t touched, and a carafe of wine, which was almost empty. He blinked nervously and stretched his neck, uncramping his muscles.

  “I know more about the internment camps than any of you. I know what the camps are like, what the barges used to transport deportees smell like. I know what the snow tastes like, what it feels like to be bitten by guard dogs. I know the sound it makes when a rifle butt breaks a tibia or an elbow. Yes, I know all about you.”

  Instructor Velichko was surprised at how much the prisoner had changed in a few short weeks. Despite Srolov’s reservations and his desire to get rid of the problem this man posed as quickly as possible, he’d done his job well. First he had made Elías bathe. Without the layer of blood and filth caked on him, in a used but clean cotton shirt, he looked a bit more human. He was much younger than Velichko initially thought. His one eye flickered like a candle, and a beard, coarsely trimmed but clean, had begun to grow on his cheeks and around his swollen lips. His nose was oddly shaped, the bridge sunken; it would never regain its natural shape.

  “You don’t find our methods to your liking? What a pity. Do keep in mind that you are a deportee, not a guest here to visit the Bolshoi. You were arrested for a reason, that much is clear.”

  Elías clamped his hands in his armpits. Suddenly he had a chill, the sort of chill that lived within him, came and went in waves. Raw.

  “So, what is a Spanish student of engineering doing with these words tattooed on his chest? How did you get to Nazino? And more important, how did you escape and make it to Moscow?”

  Elías looked at him suspiciously. He no longer had the terrified expression he’d had upon arrival. The empty eye socket had been covered with a crude patch. He didn’t reply and again looked out the window. Rocking softly in his chair, Elías moved his lips silently. Velichko called over the girl who had been coming in the afternoons to change his clothes and bandages and look after him. Until then, she hadn’t said a word. The instructor ordered her to repeat the question in Spanish.

  “He says they’re not going to hurt you, and that you have to cooperate. Otherwise, you will be handed over to the OGPU.”

  Elías glanced at her in surprise. She gave a faint smile, barely perceptible. He must have liked hearing his own language, albeit the tortuous unnatural version of it she spoke. He looked up at Instructor Velichko and then suspiciously at Srolov, who remained at one side. Slowly, like the wheels of a train just pulling out, he began to speak.

  People who don’t know the steppe tend to think of vast expanses of snow, a wide-open landscape where temperatures plummet as soon as the sun goes down. But that’s only in the winter. In the summer, after the thaw, the steppe is a hot, steamy hell where the sweat sticks oppressively to your body and attracts flies and mosquitoes by the thousands. It drives you crazy, there’s no way to get away from them. They hound you day and night, attacking your body, crawl into every orifice they can find. It’s like you’re
a rotting carcass, except they don’t have the patience to wait for you to die; instead they eat you alive. And for hundreds of miles, there’s nothing but stinking swamps and marshland, endless shrubs, and not even a single berry to eat.

  From time to time you see a hare or a bird, completely unfazed by the presence of a human. All they do is hop off or move to another branch, dodging the poorly aimed stone tossed weakly at them. It’s torture, watching prey mock your attempts to hunt as you starve. The horizon is enough to drive you insane, blending in with the cloudless sky at some indistinguishable point in the distance—nothing, no sound, no houses, no roads. It must be the same loneliness the first men on earth felt. Agonizing. The earth is simply a grave, patiently awaiting its tribute.

  Elías walked for hours, like a zombie, shifting Anna from his arms to his shoulders until his body was numb, and then dropping to his knees or falling and pulling the girl along with him. Sometimes he was delirious for minutes at a time—which seemed like hours—gazing at the sky and not caring about anything, until Anna moaned or her grubby little fingers touched his face. Then, somehow, he would find the strength he didn’t know he still had and set off again. Moving onward, it didn’t matter where. To chase away the hunger he would think. And his only thought was of Irina, and the river where he’d let her drown to keep from being pulled under himself.

  He conjured up the hazy scene that seemed so long ago: Irina sinking in the turbulent waters, him swimming to the surface, his lungs about to explode, the pages of her little book of poems floating in the water. One night he carved her name into the locket with a stone. He cried for a long time, contemplating the photo, contemplating Anna’s tiny trembling body. The girl was so weak she hardly moved or made a sound, as if some primitive instinct urged her to reduce all activity to a minimum in order to survive. And still they weren’t going to make it, Elías was fully aware of that. The girl would die before him, in a matter of days, if not hours. And then…then he could eat.